


Brooklyn, Brooklyn

by nerddowell



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Serum, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 22:04:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4322448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier returns to his old neighbourhood, and finds a lot of memories meeting him.</p><p>Steve has lived his life believing something about his old friend that... well, that isn't strictly true.</p><p>Title from the Avett Brothers song, "I And Love And You".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brooklyn, Brooklyn

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for everything that comes with the Winter Soldier, to be honest - so blood, death, etc. Not explicit, but referenced.
> 
> Also, this was written at 2AM and as such is unbetaed. I apologise for any mistakes!

_Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in_  
_are you aware the state I'm in?_  
_My hands they shake, my head it spins_  
_ah, Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in_

It takes him far too long to recognise the place he has known for so long. It's always been a part of him before - the roughness in his voice, still accented and full of the smoky city air; the bruises across his knuckles where they bulge out from clenched fists - but now, he feels like a stranger, a man out of time, that tiny piece of his home he's always subconsciously hung onto having worked its way out from under his skin. God knows who he is, now; God knows, he himself has no idea. Nothing is the same as he left it, seventy years ago; it never could be.

The brickwork is darkened and eroded in places from almost a century of rain, snow and wind grinding away at it; the bright reds of his childhood dulled to a dark brown, like dried blood. It makes him shudder; he's seen far too much of that. Never his own; always other people's - dripping from his fingers, his knife, his hair. As though he'd bathed in it. As though he'd drowned in it.

He'd drowned James Buchanan Barnes in blood. Dripping from the fingers of his metal arm, locking the dying memories of a boy's Brooklyn childhood rescuing smaller, less scrappy kids from behind diners and shadowy alleyways, kicking the bullies to the kerb, licking his thumb to rub the smudges of blood and grime off of their cheeks before their Ma could see it. A kind boy; not necessarily a good one. A dead boy, now.

He'd dragged one kid out of a river. A tiny little shrimp of a boy, with too-big blue eyes and a body that only just wrapped around the bones of his skeleton, like coat hangers stretched over with tissue paper. A kid you could throw into a breeze and watch it send him floating away, a paper kite dancing on the wind, all jagged angles and flailing limbs. The kid had threatened to punch him, too, once he was done coughing half the damn river out of his lungs and could actually focus those too-bright eyes on his face. The kid was small - barely up to Bucky's shoulder, and half as broad - but he was _big_ around that. Took up next to no space - fit perfectly under Bucky's armpit, actually, when he slung an arm around those skinny shoulders - but the _light_ around him. That could fill a baseball stadium, and then some. And Bucky got pulled in to it like gravity; helplessly, and willingly.

 _Where had the_ Bucky _come from?_ That was a name that meant nothing to him any more; 'Bucky' was as foreign a person - as imaginary - as a character from a tv show, or an old movie.

The kids - Bucky and the river kid - had been best friends, he knew. Knew it like he'd read it in a book, a newspaper maybe - been told it by someone else, but it didn't mean anything to him. It had happened to Bucky, not to him.

The Howling Commandos exhibit at the Smithsonian had been equally confusing. He couldn't risk going in there without any protection, of course - people tended to remember the man with the metal arm who'd tried to murder their national hero - but he'd kept his hair loose over his face and a cap pulled down low over his face - hiding behind the curtains of dark waves. There was a whole section devoted to Bucky and Steve, the sergeant and the captain, the soldiers. 'Inseparable', they were called, 'from schoolyard to battlefield'. Had they known each other that long? He supposed they must have done. They met when they were kids, after all - Bucky was right when he managed to drag that scrawny half-drowned little punk out of the water, and pounded the river out of his lungs by slamming that frail body against a rock. It seems strange to him now, watching the images play like a movie, that Bucky treated that body so roughly - bones so slender they could be paper, ribcage like the spines of an umbrella, bones that could've broken like sticks of chalk with barely a shove. _So easy. Barely worth the effort._ But the kid was resilient, for all he looked like a drowned rat, clothes hanging off him and weighing next to nothing even when dripping wet, and he'd managed to cough it all up and still threaten to pound Bucky back. Bucky had laughed, ruffled the wet hair, and taken him back to his house, uncaring about the wetness soaking through his own shirt. His ma had pitched a fit, but the kid had looked at him like he was the whole world for a moment, and that meant so much more to Bucky.

Bucky was a kid, always had been. Sure, he'd thought himself a man - been with a dame or two, been out dancing and drinking, even signed himself up for the war - but none of that made him a man. Men aren't grown, they ain't born; they're made, forged from steel and suffering, the furnaces turned up so high that every piece of the soft boyish innocence and mercy and pity and _fear_ gets burned away, and they're cauterised. Numbed to the world, numb to everything that made them kind. Kind like the boy that had pulled Steve out of the river. Bucky, even when he died, was a boy.

His fingers flexed irritably by his side, and he yanks his sleeve down to cover as much of the glistening fingertips as he can as he steps away, down streets he once would remember and recognise. Now, Brooklyn is as foreign as everywhere else. He's an alien here; an unwanted, uninvited visitor on the earth. Nowhere is home; he hasn't had one in seventy years. Not since he woke up in that bed, his vision swimming, and choked that orderly with fingers that stayed cool as they snapped his neck like a toothpick. Home is for people; home is for humans. He is neither.

He stands on the street corner and stares blankly at the street marker. He barely sees it, even with the serum-enhanced vision. It can make him look, but it can't make him _see_. Only Steve had ever been able to make Bucky truly _see_.

The street had been alive with ragged boys running, shouting to one another as they raced up and down the road, challenging each other and shrieking as they won (or lost). Steve was always too sick to go out and play - something or another would keep him cooped up inside, allergies in summer or colds in winter, lungs rattling and nose full of snot and snorting thickly every time he tried to take a breath. Bucky would sit beside him on the sill, chatter away nonsensically as Steve laughed and nodded with him, his eyes on the boys outside, pencil inching over the pad in front of him. He'd draw on anything he could find; napkins in diners, old newspapers, envelopes, homework papers. Always the small details, like a boy's shirt as he ran, the creases at the elbow and the rumpled collar; or the expression on his face, the scrunched-up eyes and crinkled nose, the fierce, disgusted blush as his ma rubbed a spot of dirt off his grubby cheek with her hankie. His eye for detail was incredible; looking at his drawings, Bucky noticed. Bucky _saw_ everything, for the first time.

As they got older, Steve would hide his drawings more behind a protective arm thrown around the edges of the paper, tilting it up higher against his knees to stop Bucky from peeking. And no matter how he teased, how he poked and prodded and pleaded to see, Steve wouldn't show him. He kind of got used to not _seeing_ any more. But he missed it, still.

The longer he thought on it - and now, like in the S.H.I.E.L.D. aircraft, _he_ was getting dragged into _Bucky's_ memories - the more he remembered. Bucky hadn't seen any of Steve's drawings since they hit their teens - Bucky suddenly shooting up a foot and a half, his stocky child's body bulking out even further and becoming well- muscled with his constant fighting, constantly kicking another bully's ass to the kerb and dragging Steve out of there like the devil himself was after them. He never went looking for trouble; he never had to. It always found Steve just fine, and, well - wherever Steve was, Bucky would never be far away. Everyone knew that. You never saw one without the other, not since they were kids.

Steve stayed a short, skinny little punk even through puberty - smarter-mouthed than ever, damn him, but skinny. That light Bucky had seen when he was younger, it got even bigger, even brighter - as if to make up for the lack of physical size. He'd joked before that the sun must've shone outta Steve's ass, but now he wasn't sure he was still teasing. Because Christ knows he thought it was probably true.

Steve wasn't like Bucky in a lot of ways. The size was one, of course, but there were others. Steve never went with a girl; never asked her to dance, never pressed her up against him as he kissed her, never flipped her skirt up for a quick fumble and a hot exchange of breaths as he buried his face in her shoulder and fingered the hot, wet space between her legs. Not for want of trying, at least as far as the first part; but the girls never seemed to look at him twice the way they did at Bucky, not even on their double dates. Bucky would try and find him a girl, and every time Steve would be a perfect gentleman, kind and charming and sweet - all the things Bucky wasn't - and yet, it'd be Bucky getting the girls and Steve left to be a wallflower for every dance they called. Their loss. _Bucky_ knew how special he was, and Bucky hoped that that would suffice. At least for now.

Steve wasn't like Bucky. Steve was - always had been - a _good_ boy; a good man. A mouthy little punk, a scrappy little pain-in-the-ass - but a good kid. He'd walk a lady home after dark, same as Bucky; he'd never kiss and tell (even if he had had the opportunity); but he was _better_. That light that shone out of him, it permeated every inch of that tiny body. He'd stand up to big guy after big guy, fellas twice his size (twice _Bucky's_ size, even), and he'd stand whatever little ground he had. Because he knew what was _right_ , and he'd never back down from it. He was everything fierce and just and good about the world, and Bucky was hopelessly gone for him every time he had whoever he was fighting "on the ropes, Buck."

"Sure you did, Stevie," Bucky would laugh, and Steve would scowl fondly, and Bucky would feel that swooping in his stomach that no girl, no matter how pretty, ever made him feel.

He stopped in front of an old building he recognised from those old movies playing in his head - from the movies of Bucky's memories, of him and Steve and fights and dance halls and sitting on the sill together as Steve hid his sketch pad - and hesitated on the stoop, too nervous to ring the bell in case someone was home. Because surely nobody lived there any more - nobody he'd know, anyway. He doesn't know anyone anymore. Not even himself. Not even -

Steve used to get through sketch pads quick. One week he'd have one backed in green, pages clear and unmarked with graphite or watercolour or whatever artist's materials he could afford, and within the month he'd have another one because the first one had filled up. Bucky would tease him, asking to know which pretty dame he'd found to make him draw so much, asking if it was naughty pictures he was always doodling away at - waggling his eyebrows, just to see Steve blush - and laugh when Steve went scarlet and shoved him, protesting his innocence. He knew it wouldn't ever have been dirty pictures - Steve didn't have the experience, or probably even the imagination, to draw anything like that - but it still gave him a happy sort of flutter in his stomach.

The day he got his orders, he found Steve behind a movie theatre, some hulking asshole wailing on him like a boxer's training dummy, and he couldn't help seeing red. He was leaving, he wouldn't be able to protect Steve any more, not when he was miles away getting shot at in Europe - and he didn't need any other reminders that Steve's size and inability to back down to someone bigger and stronger than him would land him in trouble. He'd say he _had him on the ropes_ again, of course, but still. Bucky would always intervene, always send whichever asshole it was this week howling for his Ma. Christ knows nobody was allowed to lay a finger Steve - not like that - while there was still breath in his body.

"I had him on the ropes."

"Sure you did," Bucky said shortly, repeating their routine, and Steve nodded. His face fell when he saw the uniform, though, and Bucky's stomach pitched sickeningly. He didn't want to go while Steve still needed him. But he was lying to himself. Anyone who knew them knew Steve could handle himself, even in a fight when he got his skinny ass handing to him - it had never been a question of _him_ needing _Bucky_ , not really. It was Bucky who needed him. _Bucky_ who needed that light, that resilience to balance all the darkness whirling inside him. All that doubt, all that fear.

Bucky had always been a kid. Steve had always been a man.

That darkness was even thicker now, thick and sticky in his veins like treacle, constricting and malignant. He'd been too long out of the light. Hydra had kept him frozen for too long, wiped him too many times - all he was now was a shell, a container for that darkness, with a human's face and a demon's body. He remembered the priests at church when he was younger, always banging on about the soul, the thing that made men good; Bucky had never believed in it, til he met Steve. He believed in it even less now. Whatever he had had was gone now, destroyed by Hydra with electricity and surgery and the serum, as bastardised a version of Steve's it was. What had Dr. Erskine said? _It makes good, great. Bad, it makes worse._ Steve was a good man. Bucky was not.

Steve had been the one to find him, naturally. Never one without the other, even as kids; he would always have been the one. He was the better man.

He yelled for Bucky to go without him, to leave him there on the railing to let the factory burn down around him and take America's last glowing hope with him. _Over Bucky's dead body._ So Steve had taken a running jump, soared into the abyss between them with the air behind him crackling and burning, swallowed up by the flames like a phoenix, and Bucky was certain for a moment that he'd gone; that the light that had always burned around him had finally taken him back, set him alight to send him home like one of God's angels, swinging his flaming sword and serving the wicked with their justice. But then there'd been a clang and scream of stressed metal, and he'd swung up onto the gangway beside him - face smudged with soot, eyes crackling like blue lightning - and grinned, that open rosy-cheeked smile he'd had since they were just a pair of Brooklyn gutter rats running around their neighbourhood together. Bucky had grinned back, and they'd strolled out of that base like they owned the damn place. At each other's side, the way they always had been.

His finger pushed the buzzer, and the door swung open by itself, on shrieking hinges. Stepping over the threshold, he inhaled, and it felt like swallowing seventy years of memories like cigarette smoke, holding them inside his lungs until it felt like his ribcage was going to explode. The stairway melted away to the ramshackle staircase he remembered from eighty, ninety years ago, and his body seemed to shrink to that of the eight-year-old Bucky Barnes, climbing the eight flights up to the very top floor - Steve's apartment. The door there was open, too, the apartment empty apart from a figure at the window, sitting on the sill. Too tall, too broad to be who he thought it was - but then the figure turned, he saw those eyes, and the brightness resting around him in the dusty air, and he swallowed thickly. The Soldier could take over at any moment - try to destroy this, the man approaching with hands outstretched, palms up, _I come in peace_ \- so he stepped back. Steve stopped, too, lowers his hands, watching him with careful eyes.

"Been a long time, huh?" He didn't say his name. Didn't even call him 'Bucky'. Maybe that's a good thing. He killed Bucky Barnes, after all. He wasn't Steve Rogers' best friend any more. He wasn't anyone's friend. He was a warrior, a machine.  
"You come for anything in particular?"

"Memories," he answered, honestly. It was the best way he can think of to put it into words. The way his hands were shaking, his head spinning, some place inside him he didn't even realise he had anymore _aching_ at everything this tiny corner of the world still holds for him. Like a bird in a cage, he was still, waiting for the door to open. Steve was watching him still, head tilted slightly to the side, sandy hair flopping awkwardly into his eyes.

"Me too," he said quietly. "Not sure which one to say goodbye to first."

"Say goodbye to?"

Steve smiled sadly, glancing at the walls with their peeling wallpaper and grimy windows. "This isn't our Brooklyn any more, Buck. This isn't home."

"This was your apartment." _This was always home, for Bucky at least. For your Bucky._

"You remember that?" Steve's mouth curled up a little at the edges, a soft smile Bucky had seen time and time again across the years, every time he'd looked at Steve. Every time.

"Yeah. Wouldn't forget anything that was yours." That was _Bucky's_ voice coming out of his mouth - _Bucky's_ words. Steve swallowed, across the room; he watched his Adam's apple bob in his throat.

"Yeah? You never had that good of a memory when we were kids."

"I remember the important stuff," he said, and Steve took a slow step towards him, his body visibly trembling. He fought the urge to step back, to run away; but Bucky made him remember the kid in the alleyway, the kid who would never back down from a fight, the kid who had been _Bucky's_ Steve, the way the person he was had once been Steve's _Bucky_.

"The important stuff?"

"Yeah." Another step towards him; he fidgeted, locking the metal fingers into a fist, shoving it behind him to try and keep it from breaking out of his control. This was _important_ , for reasons he couldn't quite remember; there was something pushing at his mind, struggling to fight its way out of the concrete locker he shoved all of _his_ memories into - the locker everything he'd seen today had been dragged out of.

"What's the important stuff, Buck?" Steve asked, slowly. His expression was wary. Probably frightened of pushing him too far. There was only the two of them here, after all; if there was a fight, it would take a while for any backup to arrive.

_I won't fight you_

"This was your ma's apartment."

_you're my friend_

"Yeah. Remember her room was just through there?" Steve pointed. He didn't look, not moving his eyes from Steve's tensed body for a second.

"You used to sit there-" he pointed to the sill where Steve had been curled up a few moments before, "and draw. All the time."

"Yeah." Just confirmations. Not offering any new information; _don't overload him_. He's thankful for it. Remembering is exhausting.

"He used to sit with you. Bucky. He used to sit with you, and - and ask who you were drawing. Thought it was a girl."

"Gave me hell for it, too," Steve said wryly, chuckling, and he let out a rough bark of laughter, sharp and short like a gunshot in the strained atmosphere. The air was taut, like a string about to snap; the memory was pushing harder at him, fighting, trying to break down the wall it was trapped behind-

_you're my friend_

"Your ma died." He looked up at Steve. "Didn't she?"

"Yeah, when I was nineteen. You remember the funeral?"

"No," he answered honestly. _Not yet._ "You used to go dancing with him. None of the girls said yes, though."

Steve laughed again, wry and almost bitter. _Almost._ "Trust you to remember that, Barnes. Still rubbin' it in seventy years later." He didn't sound _angry_ about what he said - it was more frustrated. As though he'd said _the wrong thing_ \- not necessarily said a bad thing, but the wrong thing for what Steve had wanted to hear. He knew the feeling; both of them were waiting for something - maybe - but he didn't understand what it was. The tension was getting even higher - almost unbearable-

_I'm with you_

"He was your best friend."

"Yeah, he was." His voice was soft, unbearably sad. The way he'd sounded on the plane, with the metal fist raised above him, ready to deliver the last blow-

_'til the end of the line_

"He loved you."

That made Steve look up, his expression shocked before it twisted into something like pain. "No, he was my friend."

He frowned, frustrated, fighting with the memory, trying to grapple it free. _The moment I want to know what the fucking thing is, it starts wanting to hide again-_ "Your... friend?"

Steve was drawing in his pad, his head bowed over the paper, chewing his bottom lip in concentration. Every so often, his eyes would flicker up, glance over Bucky's face before focusing on the vase of flowers on his mother's coffee table to his left, and then return to the paper. Bucky's gaze trailed across to them, flicking over the paper - and then looked back. The pad, lowered slightly whilst Steve looked at the flowers again, wasn't showing a picture of flowers. Instead there was the angle of a strong jaw, the soft lines of long eyelashes, the curve of plump lips - his own face, in three-quarter profile, as though he were looking out at something off the page. All soft eyes and slightly-open mouth. Steve was drawing _him_.

_'til the end of the line_

"Yes. A friend. He loved me... like a friend." He found himself knitting his brows even more in confusion; there was more pain in Steve's voice than he understood the need for - he was undoubtedly mourning Bucky, knowing that the man in front of him - Hydra's pet attack dog, the Winter Soldier - wasn't his friend, but-

_I'm with you_

"No." He insisted, still fighting. Still following Steve's example - the scrawny kid who could never back down from a fight, for whom no struggle was insurmountable - the kid _Bucky_ had known.

"What do you know about it?" Steve said sharply, glaring at him. "You talk about him in the third person anyway - God knows you're not Bucky, you tell me often enough - how would you know how he felt?"

_with you til the end of the line, pal_

"Because..." _He used to be me. Or I used to be him. He... he was me._ "You were his friend... you're - you're _my_ friend."

"What?"

"'Til the end of the line," he breathed - _Bucky_ breathed - "I love you, punk."

Steve was stood stock-still, shellshocked. " _Buck_?"

The memory - the _boy_ \- fought his way out at last, barrelling through the cracks in the Soldier's carefully created veneer of inhumanity, and opens his eyes, the world narrowing from New York, Brooklyn, this apartment to just _Steve_ , ember-bright and shaking. "Yeah, pal."

"...You've been gone a long time, Buck. We both have."

"Well," Bucky shrugged, flashing his boyish grin - Steve seemed to melt a little, the glaze of panic and suspicion cracking - "s'better late than never. You owe me a dollar for that beer."

Steve snorted, rolling his eyes. "Yeah, whatever, Barnes."


End file.
